The Innocent and the Rake

Last Update: 26 July 2002

THE INNOCENT AND THE RAKE
David Shannon
Radio Times
November 23, 1991

Two million pounds, a million words, 1,500
costumes, four tonnes of cobbles and two charismatic stars - how
BBC TV made a drama out of an 18th century classic. Asked to name
an exciting period in world history, few people would make England
in the mid-18th century their first choice. Thin on the ground
as far as armadas, civil wars and revolutions are concerned, it
is remembered for little these days except coffee houses, fops,
Samuel Johnson and cheap gin. If tested, nine out of ten Britons
probably couldn't even identify who was on the throne at the time.

But a work of fiction first published then
still holds our interest today: Samuel Richardson's "Clarissa".
One of the first, greatest and longest novels ever written in
English, it's about a wealthy, headstrong young woman who falls
out with her family and in with a beguiling but treacherous rake.
A major influence on de Laclos's "Les Liaisons Dangereuses",
"Clarissa" has been adapted for a new three-part drama
series which begins on BBC2 on Wednesday.

Even though Richardson meant his novel to
be morally improving, this didn't stop him taking an unusually
keen interest in matters depraved and corrupt. In the series,
as in the novel, Clarissa innocently finds herself taking refuge
in a house which turns out to be a brothel. Maddened by her refusal
to yield to him, the rake ends up drugging and raping her.

Even before its screening, "Clarissa"
had its critics. One newspaper complained that the end of the
story had been changed and attacked director Robert Bierman for
not having read every word of the novel. As there are more than
a million of them, filling seven volumes, this isn't really surprising.
Producer Kevin Loader points out that screenplay writers David
Nokes and Janet Barron both know it backwards."In a way,
it is better to have a director who will come in and say, 'you're
all getting bogged down in the novel. I need to make it work as
a film'."

Cherished by some as a pioneering feminist
work, the main theme of the book remains relevant today: the fate
of a young woman who makes a stand against her family, recognises
her duty towards them but won't be bullied by them and attempts
to strike out on her own. David Nokes and Janet Barron describe
"Clarissa" as "one of the most powerful fictional
explorations of sexual politics in English. Its significance as
an outstanding study of sexual obsession and identity has been
strongly reasserted in the present decade." Like "Les
Liaisons Dangereuses", the novel allows its narrative to
unfold entirely through letters - a televisual equivalent of watching
paint dry. "We've distilled it down to a pacey story, although
we keep the letters where they are essential to the plot,"
says Kevin Loader.

Period adaptations are, as Loader has discovered,
risky projects to undertake. Viewers are quick to notice not only
tinkerings with the plot but such howlers as swordfights taking
place in front of electricity pylons. Patience, skill and a UKL2
million budget have enabled the "Clarissa" production
team to avoid such pitfalls.

"The BBC has a great tradition in adapting
classic novels, although it has been slightly out of fashion in
the past five years," says Loader. "There is a great
attention to period detail in "Clarissa", but I hope
we've also been able to skew the genre slightly. We chose a director
who has never done such work before and is better known for modern
thrillers ("Vampire's Kiss"). And we deliberately chose
a young cast. When adaptations were in their heyday, it was almost
as if a BBC repertory company popped up in every one. We were
keen to do one without the usual faces in it."

Hence 24-year-old Saskia Wickham, making
her screen debut as Clarissa. Although the character she plays
is innocent and impressionable Wickham insists she isn't just
another of romantic fiction's soppy drips. "Drips don't run
away from their parents in the middle of the night with rakes,
or from whorehouses in the middle of the night with no money,"
she says. "The whole point about Clarissa is that she is
feisty. She is very strong-willed, but very naive, and that's
why she gets into so much trouble."

Lovelace, the scoundrel who provides most
of the trouble for her to get into, is played by 32-year-old Sean
Bean, seen recently as the dog-doting father in Julie Burchill's
BBC1 Screen One drama, "Prince". The secret of playing
an unpleasant character well, he thinks, is "to make them
as likeable as possible without losing their sinister side. Lovelace
is a young aristocrat whose sport is chasing women into bed. The
bigger the challenge - the more they resist - the more he enjoys
it. Like most young men, he's out for a good time. He just goes
about it in a different way to most of them."

While few television programmes command
UKL2 million budgets nowadays, period drama has always been an
expensive business - especially where outside locations are used.
"Doors have to be changed, lines painted out, cars moved
and signs taken down," says "Clarissa's" production
designer Gerry Scott. "Even if you find the right building,
by the time you've redecorated it, put its furniture in store
and paid for the actors, it works out cheaper to build it from
scratch." Also responsible for the elaborate sets in last
year's adaptation of Kingsley Amis's "The Green Man",
Gerry Scott is renowned for creating sets so convincing that few
people realise they aren't real locations. Among the period pieces
she had built for "Clarissa" were a three-storey Georgian
house, a coaching inn and a London street market. Her hardest
job, though, was finding the right soft furnishings. "We
ended up with a lot of stuff that wasn't exactly correct for the
period. We just hope that it won't scream 'Victorian!' too loudly."

Curtains, however, did work as inspiration
for costume designer Ken Trew. "Their strong patterns proved
ideal for the period," he says. William Hogarth's prints
and paintings provided valuable reference, too. The hair and make-up
people only had to look at portraits from the time to understand
the mid-18th century idea of physical beauty: fashionable young
men never left home without a wig - preferably white, pink or
lilac. Fashionable young women believed having a double chin,
wearing pink eye shadow and whitening their faces with lead make-up
all improved their looks.

Fortunately, we won't have a lead-faced
heroine. Polly Fehily, who took care of Saskia Wickham's make-up,
had an important advantage. "Some of the characters are made
up in ways quite alien to us. If Clarissa was a society girl,
it would have been difficult to make her look a tractive to a
modern audience. But she is a country girl and supposed to look
natural."

The biggest cosmetic overhaul was reserve
for the male lead, including, at the start of each day's filming,
fitting Sean Bean's wig. "Women wore their hair quite plainly,
but, whatever the station, most men wore wigs," says make-up
supervisor Marilyn McDonald. "Long hair was fashionable and,
if a young man couldn't grow it himself, he'd wear a wig. Lovelace
even has wig for what is supposed to be his own hair."

Sean Bean might be grateful that, unwigged,
he looks nothing like the lascivious Lovelace. "I've played
unlikeable characters before and no one has yet come up and thumped
me," he says. Kevin Loader adds: "He doesn't get much
attention because he's so different off camera: a shy unassuming
chap you'd be happy to have a few pints of lager with."

If, in the course of a few lagers, you find
yourself trying to remember who was on the throne in 1748, perhaps
the following will help: he came immediately before George III,
immediately after George I and wasn't called William or Mary.
All right, I had to look him up too. Dressing for the Part Costume
designer Ken Trew hired, adapted and made nearly 1,500 different
costumes for "Clarissa". Both sexes dressed to excess,
with women favouring long, panniered skirts, petticoats, corsets
and stomachers and enough ribbon to parcel wrap a small cabin
cruiser, while the men opted for square-cut coats, breeches, shirts
and waistcoats. The dark green velvet coat worn by Sean Bean on
this week's cover is heavily embroidered with silver and gold,
and weighs almost as much as a suit of armor. "If you had
money then, you flaunted it," says Trew.

Some of the corsets the female characters
had to wear were so stiff they couldn't sit down in them. "The
way we stood and moved was dictated a lot by the costumes,"
says Saskia Wickham. "You couldn't slouch and you certainly
couldn't rush around - it was all very restrained."